ART BRUSSELS | FOR A LANGUAGE TO COME: Booth 6A-08

Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach presents a group exhibition For a Language to Come centered on the artistic use of systems and languages. The six artists are presented in formal and conceptual dialogue with one another. The seriality of the faces and objects in Ken Ohara’s legendary 1970 photographic series ONE mirrors Thomas Devaux’s condensed representation of the iconic Shopper reflecting our narcissistic desires. The rituals of technological objects in Alice Anderson's monumental Spiritual Machines, comprised of 41 statuettes, resonate with Lita Alburquerque's photographic drawings, imbued with sacred geometry. A succession of various fires as divine punishments subtly added by Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil to found postcards welcome Wortmischungen, the new language generated by LAb[au] that aggregates in a single but almost infinite series of artworks the essence of all things : colors and words.

Alice Anderson
Spiritual Machines
Winner of the Prix SAM 2023 for contemporary art, finalist for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2020, Alice Anderson's artistic practice lies at the intersection of spirituality and technology. Anderson forges a unique language through her performances of the power and intelligence of the body, alone and collectively, dancing with objects and spaces. From these intuitive, gestural Technological Dances, in which the performer poetically reactivates the strong link between the human and the nonhuman, large-scale paintings are born. Computers, drones, batteries, virtual reality masks (etc...) are coated in paint, leading the artist into a dance of hyper-ventilated breathing that guides her into a trance, where objects animated by repetitive movements generate points of impact on the canvas on the floor. These technological objects, memorized on the canvas through painting, are then assembled and crystallized with copper-colored wire - a material symbolizing neuronal and technological connections - to become sculptures. Alice Anderson's monumental sculptural work Spiritual Machines, an ensemble of technological tools crystallized in this way, was created over a period of ten years and memorizes the objects of the Anthropocene era. The title Spiritual Machines refers to the book The Age of the Spiritual Machines, published in 1999 by artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil. Anderson has recently exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Centre Pompidou and Atelier Calder, among others.
LAb[au]
Wortmischungen
At Art Brussels we offer a premiere look at LAb[au]’s new series Wortmischungen (mixtures of words), which will open in two exhibitions, one at the gallery, and one at Botanique in late May. The artists use an algorithm to link two colors – both in name and in form – to see what their fusion creates linguistically and visually. To create Romantik, for example, they mixed rot (red) and kamin (carmine), to create a work that dances along the tension between the intuitive, emotional and perceptual and the logical, analytical and conceptual. As crossing words is not the same as mixing colors, the monochromes produced within this antagonism speak to the long and dualistic relationship between the visual and the written, between the image and the language. The works are stored in index card drawers, creating a dictionary of possible alchemies, and presented as incantations framed on the wall. The artistic collective has exhibited in institutions including MOMA, la Biennale di Venezia, Centre Pompidou, the New Museum, Le Louvre, etc.
Lita Albuquerque
Sol Star Grid

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Lita Albuquerque, Sol Star Grid 1, 1996/2014
In a set of 5 photo-drawings of her installation at the Pyramids in Giza in 1996, Lita Albuquerque layers graphs, symbols, honeycomb structures and a replica of the map of the stars she created in situ for her Sol Star desert performance for the Cairo Biennial, where she represented the United States and won first prize. Albuquerque is a canonical female Land Artist known for her use of pigment in her large-scale, site specific ephemeral works. She was recently included in Groundswell - Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Light & Space exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary, and held a solo show at La Patinoire that brought her Land Art indoors for the first time in Europe.
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil
D'après nature

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In D’après nature, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil has created a series of painted postcards that overlay nostalgic iconography with unforeseen disaster. He uses found historic photographs and engravings of monuments that he manipulates to insert a record of fires that devastated the sites in subsequent years. The repetition of his process for the treatment of the various locations extends into an immersive language evoking derridean hauntology — “time is out of joint” — and an unsettling historiography of triumph and catastrophe. Auguste-Dormeuil is laureate of the Prix Meurice pour l'art contemporain, a former resident of the French Academy in Rome and has exhibited at Villa Medici, MACRO, Palais de Tokyo and others.
GRAIN P-1, 1993

Gelatin silver prints mounted under Plexiglass

240 x 197.2 cm

Artworks
Ken Ohara
ONE + Grain
Using a set of strict parameters, Ken Ohara created ONE, a series of tight portraits of over 500 ordinary New Yorkers whose probing and repetitive framing trouble notions of similarity and difference, constructions of identity, and gather our simultaneous diversity and universality as humankind. In Grain, Ohara took the negatives of the ONE photographs and expanded them to monumental scales, creating imposing and penetrating portraits at 240 x 197.2 cm. Collected into a telephone-book like tome, Ohara’s indexical artist book was originally published by Tsukiji Shokan in 1970. Ohara has exhibited at MOMA, LACMA and others, and earned a Guggenheim fellowship.
Thomas Devaux
The Shoppers
In Thomas Devaux’s series The Shoppers, the artist pushes photographic processes to a painterly extreme. Devaux has created a system that uses abstraction, dichroic glass and surveillance imagery to build his lauded series. Fantasized and sublimated, The Shoppers are caught in the drudgerous quotidian encounter of requisite consumption — paying for groceries. With their evanescent glow and entrancing glass, spectral, specific and yet anonymous, The Shoppers stands as an icon for all of us: relentless, largely unconscious, consumers. Devaux has recently had exhibitions and events at the Centre Pompidou, la Maison Européen de la Photographie, and the Louis Vuitton boutique in Paris, and his work is held in prestigious private and public collections, including that of the BNF.

Cet Obscur Objet du Désir, of which The Shoppers is part, will be concurrently on view at La Patinoire Royale Bach in a unique architectural installation in the gallery’s nave.
* Takuma Nakahira, For a Language to Come, 1970 Fudo-sha, Tokyo